From Psycholinguistics to Computer Vision. A Comprehensive Review of Object Naming Data and Studies

ABSTRACT In recent years, much research has focused on what happens in the human brain when a perceptual stimulus, such as a picture, is converted into linguistic content, a word. This process is commonly referred to as object naming and is considered a crucial aspect of language processing, production, and cognition. It refers to the identification of an object with a word or phrase, as well as the psychometric method of investigating this human behavior to obtain insights into different aspects of human cognition and language, such as the organization of the mental lexicon, language acquisition, disorders, or cognitive aging. The ability to name objects is considered a fundamental skill in interpersonal communication and has long been studied in numerous disciplines, such as cognitive science, psycholinguistics, psychology, and, more recently, in computer vision and research on language and vision. In the latter two, object naming has become an extremely powerful tool, especially in the development and fine‐tuning of multi‐modal models, facilitating tasks such as visual question answering, image captioning tasks, object detection, or visual scene understanding. Our comprehensive, cross‐linguistic review explores the key findings, commonly cited, and prominent datasets and their applications that establish object naming both in the past and now, as well as discusses its chances and challenges in future work.